The word within quotes in my title above is a nod to the high incidence of fraud among refugee and asylum cases. Much more needs to be written about that.

Meanwhile, there’s a notion out there that refugees—and “refugees”—are just here temporarily, that they’ll return home as soon as things settle down back there. In this picture, permanent resettlement in a land away from one’s origin is the exception, not the rule.

“Refugee resettlement is a strategy that’s been the last resort,” said Stacie Blake of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants. “The first option for anyone who’s in the situation of being a refugee is that whatever it is that’s causing you to flee would be resolved and you can go home. If that is not possible, we might look for a solution in the country where the refugee fled.”

That assertion by Stacie Blake earned a snort of derision when I ran it by Ann Corcoran, proprietress of the indispensable Refugee Resettlement Watch blog. She added, "The UN is currently sending some refugees back to Somalia from camps in Kenya, yet we're still taking in thousands of Somali 'refugees' per year."

The Contracting States shall as far as possible facilitate the assimilation and naturalization of refugees. They shall in particular make every effort to expedite naturalization proceedings and to reduce as far as possible the charges and costs of such proceedings.

White House officials announced the start of a nationwide campaign on Thursday to encourage legal immigrants to become American citizens, which could add millions of voters to the electorate in time for the presidential election next year.

Indeed, "refugees" are a significant fraction of the annual influx of new LPRs. For example, the official U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2013 Yearbook of Immigration Statistics [PDF] tells us that in Fiscal Year 2013, 990,553 persons obtained LPR status, and 459,751 of them were new arrivals (Table 7, page #20). Among the 990,553, 119,630 were refugees or asylees (Table 7, page #23), and 69,909 of these were "Refugee Arrivals" (Table 13, page #39).